The CIA's secret interrogation program amounted to torture for some
of the 14 "high-value detainees" held by the agency, according to
published excerpts of an internal 2006 report by the International
Committee of the Red Cross.

The ICRC report was obtained by Mark
Danner, a journalist and professor at the University of California at
Berkeley, and excerpted in the April 9 issue of the New York Review of
Books.

The neutral, Swiss-based ICRC is designated by the Geneva
Conventions on warfare to visit prisoners of war and other people
detained by an occupying power, to ensure countries respect their
obligations under the 1949 accords.

ICRC officials would not confirm details of the report to The Associated Press and denied leaking it.

"We
regret that information attributed to the ICRC has been made public. We
share our observations and concerns related to U.S. detentions as part
of the confidential dialogue we maintain with U.S. authorities and so
we do not wish to comment on the substance of the article," said Simon
Schorno, a spokesman for the Geneva headquarters of the International
Committee of the Red Cross.

The ICRC generally refuses to comment
on its prisoner-of-war investigations, reasoning that it undermines the
organization's ability to gain access to the prisoners and influence
how they are treated.

A U.S. official familiar with the ICRC
report noted that the claims of abuse were made by the alleged
terrorists themselves. The official asked to speak anonymously because
the CIA interrogation program is classified.

The ICRC was granted
private access by the Bush administration to the 14 prisoners after
they were moved from secret interrogation sites and prisons to
Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in 2006.

According to the report, as
described by Danner, the prisoners separately and consistently
described long-term solitary confinement, waterboarding - which
simulates drowning - prolonged stress positions, forced prolonged
nudity, beatings, denial of solid food and other forms of abuse.

"The
allegations of ill-treatment of the detainees indicate that, in many
cases, the ill-treatment to which they were subjected while held in the
CIA program, either singly or in combination, constituted torture. In
addition, many other elements of the ill-treatment, either singly or in
combination, constituted cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment," states
the report, according to Danner.

The report was written shortly
after then-President George W. Bush publicly declared that the United
States does not and had not tortured detainees at secret CIA prisons
known as "black sites."

The Obama administration has ordered the
sites closed and has restricted the CIA to using only those
interrogation methods approved for use by the U.S. military until a
complete review of the program is conducted.

A purported al-Qaida
training manual, obtained by police in Manchester, England in 2000 from
the computer of an alleged al-Qaida operative, instructs adherents to
claim torture or abuse if they are captured. The document was
translated and posted onto the U.S. Justice Department's Web site.

A
leaked 2003 ICRC report said that prisoners in U.S. custody in Iraq had
been abused in ways that in some cases was tantamount to torture. The
report was written before the abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison became
public. It was leaked shortly after they became known.